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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The Washington Naval
Yard mass murder has produced a macabre good news/bad news story:

The good news is
that a week before the shooting a Virginia gun dealer didn’t sell an AR-14
assault rifle to the shooter, Aaron Alexis, because Alexis wasn’t a resident of
the state, a requirement under Virginia state law.

The bad news is that
the dealer did sell Alexis the pump-action shot gun he used to kill 12 innocent
people.

What if Virginia had
tougher laws and only permitted sales of all kinds of guns to residents? Or
what if gun purchase standards were higher everywhere and we had a robust database
of gun offenders and persons with documented behavior that should preclude gun
ownership, behavior like hearing “voices speaking to him through the wall,” as
Alexis heard?

It should be
tragically clear to everyone that stiffened gun control laws would have
prevented Alexis from just walking into a store and buying a lethal
weapon.Those who argue that a criminal
will find a way to get a gun forget that Alexis, Lanza and most of our mass murderers
are not criminals. Something else they all have in common: all manifested
behavioral problems that should have precluded legal gun ownership or use.

We now seem to have
these national days of mourning and hand-wringing about every six months. The
public discourse following these tragedies almost always follows a classic
formula: Gun control advocates point out the obvious lesson that we need to
tighten gun control, while gun industry toadies and factotums create tortuous
arguments to show that the mass murder really proves we need more guns in the
street and less gun control.Major
political figures say they will renew efforts to pass gun control laws, but “momentum”
peters out in days or weeks.There’s a
spike in both gun sales (out of fear of gun control) and articles in the mass
media analyzing the impossibility of getting any gun control legislation
passed. Nothing happens.

That’s sad, but
what’s even sadder is that these occasional mass murders collectively represent
a drop in the bucket of all the U.S. deaths and injuries annually from
guns—from accidents, disputes among family and friends, suicides and
murder.If we use a base figure of 32,000 deaths by guns a year, that works out to almost 88 a day. We typically have
national days of mourning when a crazed killer takes the lives of 12 or 24
people.Perhaps we should declare every
day a day of mourning.

The
gun lobby has tried to sell us the bill of goods that more people packing will
make the streets safer, because the bad guys will be frightened of retaliation.
A study released today shows that argument is completely bogus: The study,
published Wednesday in the American Journal of Medicine (AJM), compares the
rate of firearms-related deaths in countries where many people own guns with
the gun death rate in countries where gun ownership is rare. The US, with the
most guns per head in the world, has the highest rate of deaths from firearms,
while Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, has the least. The
study concludes that guns make a nation less safe. AJM published the study
early because of the shootings at the Washington Naval Yard.

Nothing
proves the collective self-serving venality of our state and federal
legislators like the gun issue. All too many lawmakers have been bought and
sold by the gun (and the weapons) industry or are too frightened of the gun lobby’s
money to speak up on the issue of gun control. And so the needless death of
innocents continues.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.